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Daylighting, by Dan Wolf
Jun. 18th, 2014 09:27 pmSaw Daylighting today at the Shotgun Players, and it was pretty meh. The concept was good: collect stories about Berkeley from its residents* and then craft a play from that. The execution was poor.
I was first knocked out of the play when the entire cast was revealed a few minutes in and it was clear that it was entirely token. One older hippie lady, one professor, one woman in a wheel chair, one Hispanic, one Asian, one East Coast transplant, etc ... The two main characters were black and they were well-developed, but everyone else was really flat. And sometimes offensively stereotypical. For example our Indian character ... turned out to be a cab driver! And of our two Hispanic characters (played by the same actor), one was an off-book mechanic and the other was an illegal immigrant. Yeah.
And the play was horribly white-washed. Berkeley was presented as the happiest place on earth, a virtual utopia. Everyone knew each other (to the point where it because laughable) and everyone helped each other. There was no class lines, no race lines. Though the young female lead was constantly told to stay safe while wandering the streets of Berkeley at night with her iPhone out, there was no actual crime. The whole plot of the play is about the severe angst of the main character in leaving this wonderful, wonderful place.
And the play was horribly Berkeley-referential. It was filled with mentions of people, places, and things that Berkeley people could feel smug about knowing about. But shockingly, despite that, some of the geography didn't make sense -- like when the protagonist ended up at Codornices Park after following Strawberry Creek down from Memorial Stadium, or when two characters had a discussion at the BART station sometime after 1am (when BART is locked up because it isn't running).
And then there was the rap influence. I thought the actual rap songs were OK, but when the main character started speaking in rhyme as dialogue, it made zero sense. It was like Cassandra had wandered onto the stage from another play.
There was stuff to like. The characters were interesting when brought to life, the dialogue was good, there was some unusual structure that worked. But overall, definitely a failure with some elements of interest.
* Just in case you're wondering: UCB students apparently aren't residents; there weren't any of them in the play.
I was first knocked out of the play when the entire cast was revealed a few minutes in and it was clear that it was entirely token. One older hippie lady, one professor, one woman in a wheel chair, one Hispanic, one Asian, one East Coast transplant, etc ... The two main characters were black and they were well-developed, but everyone else was really flat. And sometimes offensively stereotypical. For example our Indian character ... turned out to be a cab driver! And of our two Hispanic characters (played by the same actor), one was an off-book mechanic and the other was an illegal immigrant. Yeah.
And the play was horribly white-washed. Berkeley was presented as the happiest place on earth, a virtual utopia. Everyone knew each other (to the point where it because laughable) and everyone helped each other. There was no class lines, no race lines. Though the young female lead was constantly told to stay safe while wandering the streets of Berkeley at night with her iPhone out, there was no actual crime. The whole plot of the play is about the severe angst of the main character in leaving this wonderful, wonderful place.
And the play was horribly Berkeley-referential. It was filled with mentions of people, places, and things that Berkeley people could feel smug about knowing about. But shockingly, despite that, some of the geography didn't make sense -- like when the protagonist ended up at Codornices Park after following Strawberry Creek down from Memorial Stadium, or when two characters had a discussion at the BART station sometime after 1am (when BART is locked up because it isn't running).
And then there was the rap influence. I thought the actual rap songs were OK, but when the main character started speaking in rhyme as dialogue, it made zero sense. It was like Cassandra had wandered onto the stage from another play.
There was stuff to like. The characters were interesting when brought to life, the dialogue was good, there was some unusual structure that worked. But overall, definitely a failure with some elements of interest.
* Just in case you're wondering: UCB students apparently aren't residents; there weren't any of them in the play.